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The Justice Department ought to listen when President
Bush says that fighting terrorism is the most important duty of
the government.

A gunman named Mohamed,
angered by his upstairs neighbors
who insisted on flying the
American flag from their window
after September 11, walks up to
the El Al Israeli Airlines counter at
Los Angeles International Airport,
passing up Delta, Air New
Zealand and dozens of other
carriers, and shoots a clerk and a
security guard.

The FBI can't figure out that
this was an act of terrorism. A
"hate crime," maybe, but not
terrorism. To call it by its true
name would subject the bureau and its director, the inimitable
Inspector Clouseau, to criticism that he sanctions racial
profiling. Nothing frightens a Washington bureaucrat like
criticism.

You might expect this kind of excuse-making from The
Washington Post, and in fact, this was The Post's first
account of the who, what, why, when and where: "FBI
officials said this afternoon that there was 'no indication' the
shooting was a terrorist strike, adding that neither the airport
nor the city faced any related threats. Investigators were
checking reports from witnesses that the gunman may have
been a disgruntled former employee of the airline or the
airport, or may have had a dispute over identification in the
ticket line."

No indication? Well, maybe he was a passenger and he
was afraid he would get a middle seat, or the stewardess
would be out of the filet and he would have to eat the ravioli.
Maybe he wouldn't like the movie. Maybe none of the above.
But the Israeli security officers, who were long ago expected
to get serious about Arab terrorism against Jews, operate on
the theory that if it waddles and quacks like a duck it
probably isn't a giraffe. They took a look at the dramatic
evidence - two dead Jews and one dead angry Arab -
and called it an act of terror.

In the current delicate climate the FBI has to be careful
even to call it a hate crime. A reasonable man, unencumbered
by attitudinizing, would figure that the act of spraying the El Al
counter with gunfire would be an act of hatred, not of love.
But you can't be too careful. Three psychiatrists, after all,
were required to diagnose the celebrated cannibal Jeffrey
Dahmer as crazy after the cops found several human heads
on ice in his refrigerator. Almost any one of the rest of us
would have recognized him instantly as seriously nuts. (One
day soon a court, perhaps the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals in San Francisco, will devise a "Miranda"-like
warning for killers to use to avoid being charged with hate
crimes. "Good evening, madam, I intend to rape you and then
shoot you with this .357 magnum and a hollow-nose bullet,
but I assure you that I hold you in the highest personal regard
and respect." Bang.)

If the FBI can't find the evidence to call it a hate crime,
they could call it a "rage" crime, or at least a crime of
"dislike." Or "distaste." The bureau's semantics lab, always on
the prowl for serviceable euphemism, points out that the FBI
must find that the shooter is a member of a terrorist group, on
an approved terrorist list, before it can call an act of terror an
act of terror. "On the face of things," Boaz Ganor, director of
the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism in
Jerusalem, tells the Jerusalem Post, "it was no coincidence
that he picked out the El Al counter and opened fire
indiscriminately at the passengers and staff there. This
indicates that the attack was politically motivated and that
puts it into the category of terrorist act, despite what appears
to be an American effort to calm things down by defining it as
a hate crime.

"I dare say that if a lone gunman had opened fire, for
instance, at the Continental Airways counter at Cairo
International Airport in order to deliberately kill Americans, it
would not be described as a hate crime but, quite rightly, as a
terrorist act.

"Contrary to the premise in criminal cases in which a
suspect is innocent until proved guilty, any politically
motivated crime committed against civilians because of their
ethnic or national identity should automatically be defined as a
terrorist act until proven otherwise."

President Bush is right to remind everyone that the acts of
deranged, evil or even misguided Arabs and other Muslims
are the acts of deranged, evil and even misguided Arabs, and
do not entitle anyone to tar all Muslims with the blood of
innocents. Indiscriminate profiling, racial or otherwise, is
wrong. But we delude ourselves and sabotage the war effort
if we insist on treating the war on terrorism as an exercise in
domestic politics. The November elections are not that
important.